by Dan Wolken, USA TODAY Sports

by Dan Wolken, USA TODAY Sports

LEXINGTON, Ky. â?? In the times of greatest stress, when unpaid 18-to-22 year olds are dictating the careers of men making millions, there is comfort in knowing exactly who you are, exactly where you came from and exactly what it is you do.

Late Saturday night inside Rupp Arena was one of those moments for Marquette coach Buzz Williams.

His team had just made it through another last-second crucible, this time against Butler, 74-72, putting the Golden Eagles in the Sweet 16 for a third consecutive season. It had come at the end of a week in which his wife had been hospitalized upon arrival in Lexington (she's fine) and his team had mounted an against-all-odds comeback just to survive the first round against Davidson.

And after it was over, after Butler's Andrew Smith missed a one-handed heave at the buzzer that would have changed everything, the only thing left was the raw truth. This is Marquette basketball, an imperfect high-wire act where games routinely come down to something as small as the rotation on one shot. And this is Williams, a 40-year old Texan with Juco roots, whose self-awareness about what he knows and what he doesn't seems to so often push Marquette to the right side of that line.

"I am not a genius," Williams said. "I don't want to be a genius. I don't want to be Mr. Tactician. I don't want our program to be known for that. I don't want to be tactical, I want to be tough."

The game didn't mean much, in and of itself, but it had a lasting impact on both teams. For Butler, which went on to beat Indiana and Gonzaga in similar fashion, it was another layer to the mystique of a program that survived every close call on the way to the national championship game in 2010 and 2011. For Marquette, which lost several significant players from last season, it was a revelation, albeit a painful one, that this team could be in the national conversation.

Heck, the shot had even been made into an ESPN commercial, replayed thousands and thousands of times for both teams to see.

And late Saturday night, in a game that neither team deserved to lose, the memory of a shot in November had come full circle in March. Only this time, Butler didn't have one shot to beat the Golden Eagles, it had two.

"I thought it was going to be the same result," Marquette's Davante Gardner said.

Only it wasn't. With 5.5 seconds left and Marquette leading 72-70, Clarke airballed a long 3-pointer. And then with 2.4 seconds left, after the Golden Eagles committed a ghastly turnover trying to get the ball inbounds, it came down to one inbounds play and one shot. Roosevelt Jones threw the right pass, aiming to get Smith a shot at the top of the key. But as Smith entered his shooting motion, he got thrown off just enough by the defense of Jamil Wilson to lose his footing and have to chuck up a prayer that had no chance of going in.

"He tried to pump fake, and I just kind of beat him to a spot," Wilson said. "He lost his footing and I put my hand straight up so they couldn't call anything. It seemed like (that sequence) was a whole new 20 minutes. It was a foul, an airball, something else, a turnover. It took forever, but that's how you want it to be. That's what you dream of when you're a kid and we had the guts to pull it out."

If you want, you can find the tactical reason Marquette won. On the last play, the Golden Eagles disguised their defense just enough to make Butler think they were playing zone. Instead, Marquette switched to man-to-man, and without a timeout Butler's Brad Stevens couldn't adjust.

But Williams isn't the type to take credit for that or even talk about it. A ball in Maui went in the basket. A ball in Lexington bounced off the backboard. And what fills the distance between the two partly explains how Williams does this year after year; how he builds rosters of transfers and undervalued recruits and knows that if he can get them to do certain things, there's a chance a game like Saturday's can come down to the final shot.

"We could have easily been beaten by Davidson and been beaten tonight," he said. "The character and toughness and resiliency of our guys is maybe unlike any team I've ever been around."

Of course, nobody gets to the Sweet 16 three straight years on toughness alone. You need a point guard like Vander Blue, who hit the winning layup with 1 second left against Davidson, going off for 29 against Butler and making a game-tying 3-pointer from the corner with 1:25 left. You need players who can make 23-of-27 free throws under NCAA tournament pressure, attack the rim aggressively and score against a wall of bodies. You need coaching, too, and Williams has proven beyond a reasonable doubt he's one of the best in the nation.

But for Williams, the secret is that there is no secret, and he's fine with that. Friday, he said his greatest strength as a coach is having the pulse of his players. Everything else in Williams' world is just noise in between the big March wins, a collection that is expanding at a rapid pace.

"That's just another Marquette game," he said. "We're not good enough to blow anybody out. We're just good enough to get blown out. And if we can turn it into a fight and make it ugly, then it probably trends toward helping us the most. What you saw is a microcosm of our culture."